One of Ours
Book III: Sunrise on the Prairie
Chapter III
After the heavy work of harvest was over, Mrs. Wheeler often persuaded her
husband, when he was starting off in his buckboard, to take her as far as
Claude's new house. She was glad Enid didn't keep her parlour dark, as Mrs.
Royce kept hers. The doors and windows were always open, the vines and the long
petunias in the window-boxes waved in the breeze, and the rooms were full of
sunlight and in perfect order. Enid wore white dresses about her work, and white
shoes and stockings. She managed a house easily and systematically. On Monday
morning Claude turned the washing machine before he went to work, and by nine
o'clock the clothes were on the line. Enid liked to iron, and Claude had never
before in his life worn so many clean shirts, or worn them with such
satisfaction. She told him he need not economize in working shirts; it was as
easy to iron six as three.
Although within a few months Enid's car travelled more than two thousand
miles for the Prohibition cause, it could not be said that she neglected her
house for reform. Whether she neglected her husband depended upon one's
conception of what was his due. When Mrs. Wheeler saw how well their little
establishment was conducted, how cheerful and attractive Enid looked when one
happened to drop in there, she wondered that Claude was not happy. And Claude
himself wondered. If his marriage disappointed him in some respects, he ought to
be a man, he told himself, and make the best of what was good in it. If his wife
didn't love him, it was because love meant one thing to him and quite another
thing to her. She was proud of him, was glad to see him when he came in from the
fields, and was solicitous for his comfort. Everything about a man's embrace was
distasteful to Enid; something inflicted upon women, like the pain of
childbirth,— for Eve's transgression, perhaps.
This repugnance was more than physical; she disliked ardour of any kind, even
religious ardour. She had been fonder of Claude before she married him than she
was now; but she hoped for a readjustment. Perhaps sometime she could like him
again in exactly the same way. Even Brother Weldon had hinted to her that for
the sake of their future tranquillity she must be lenient with the boy. And she
thought she had been lenient. She could not understand his moods of desperate
silence, the bitter, biting remarks he sometimes dropped, his evident annoyance
if she went over to join him in the timber claim when he lay there idle in the
deep grass on a Sunday afternoon.
Claude used to lie there and watch the clouds, saying to himself, "It's the
end of everything for me." Other men than he must have been disappointed, and he
wondered how they bore it through a lifetime. Claude had been a well behaved boy
because he was an idealist; he had looked forward to being wonderfully happy in
love, and to deserving his happiness. He had never dreamed that it might be
otherwise.
Sometimes now, when he went out into the fields on a bright summer morning,
it seemed to him that Nature not only smiled, but broadly laughed at him. He
suffered in his pride, but even more in his ideals, in his vague sense of what
was beautiful. Enid could make his life hideous to him without ever knowing it.
At such times he hated himself for accepting at all her grudging hospitality. He
was wronging something in himself.
In her person Enid was still attractive to him. He wondered why she had no
shades of feeling to correspond to her natural grace and lightness of movement,
to the gentle, almost wistful attitudes of body in which he sometimes surprised
her. When he came in from work and found her sitting on the porch, leaning
against a pillar, her hands clasped about her knees, her head drooping a little,
he could scarcely believe in the rigidity which met him at every turn. Was there
something repellent in him? Was it, after all, his fault?
Enid was rather more indulgent with his father than with any one else, he
noticed. Mr. Wheeler stopped to see her almost every day, and even took her
driving in his old buckboard. Bayliss came out from town to spend the evening
occasionally. Enid's vegetarian suppers suited him, and as she worked with him
in the Prohibition campaign, they always had business to discuss. Bayliss had a
social as well as a hygienic prejudice against alcohol, and he hated it less for
the harm it did than for the pleasure it gave. Claude consistently refused to
take any part in the activities of the Anti-Saloon League, or to distribute what
Bayliss and Enid called "our literature."
In the farming towns the term "literature" was applied only to a special kind
of printed matter; there was Prohibition literature, Sex-Hygiene literature,
and, during a scourge of cattle disease, there was Hoof-and-Mouth literature.
This special application of the word didn't bother Claude, but his mother, being
an old-fashioned school-teacher, complained about it.
Enid did not understand her husband's indifference to a burning question, and
could only attribute it to the influence of Ernest Havel. She sometimes asked
Claude to go with her to one of her committee meetings. If it was a Sunday, he
said he was tired and wanted to read the paper. If it was a week-day, he had
something to do at the barn, or meant to clear out the timber claim. He did,
indeed, saw off a few dead limbs, and cut down a tree the lightning had blasted.
Further than that he wouldn't have let anybody clear the timber lot; he would
have died defending it.
The timber claim was his refuge. In the open, grassy spots, shut in by the
bushy walls of yellowing ash trees, he felt unmarried and free; free to smoke as
much as he liked, and to read and dream. Some of his dreams would have frozen
his young wife's blood with horror—and some would have melted his mother's
heart with pity. To lie in the hot sun and look up at the stainless blue of the
autumn sky, to hear the dry rustle of the leaves as they fell, and the sound of
the bold squirrels leaping from branch to branch; to lie thus and let his
imagination play with life—that was the best he could do. His thoughts, he told
himself, were his own. He was no longer a boy. He went off into the timber claim
to meet a young man more experienced and interesting than himself, who had not
tied himself up with compromises.